SPOILER REVIEW! ‘Smile’

way to listen to the movie for free. And I have gotten messages from some listeners who listen to this episode and then are later inclined to go and watch the movie after hearing everything about it. Myself, personally, I'm okay with spoilers. If somebody tells me about the ending, what are they really going to ruin? Someone dies? That's always the spoiler that everybody you know doesn't want to hear.

But it doesn't really change anything for me anyway, if I know somebody is going to die going into it, because if it's a really good movie, it's the journey that it will take you on to get to that death that will be impactful. And if it's still does a good job at that already knowing it's coming, I don't think takes that much away from it. But anyway, let's talk about Smile. If you didn't hear the spoiler free version, the movie is about a doctor who witnesses

this crazy traumatic incident with a patient. This patient just came in after witnessing a teacher at her college killed themselves with a hammer, and then after that event, she started seeing some really haunting images, felt like there was this really dark presence around her, and she goes to Dr Rose Cotter played by Socie Bacon to try to help her out, and she's telling her about all these things and describing what she feels and what she's been seeing,

and describes that when her professor killed himself, the very last thing he did was have this really big smile on his face before he took his own life. And then this patient goes on to take her own life right in front of the doctor, and same thing happened. She has a big old smile right before she does it. It's like she just got taken over by something. It's possessed by something, and then from one end to another

end of her face she kills herself. Pretty hardcore introduction, and I think that was the scene that really set the stage for the entire movie. I thought it was going to be a lot of the same throughout the movie.

So then what you start to learn in this movie, as she starts experiencing these things, starts hearing things, start seeing things, that there's actually a long line of this happening, and she goes through some investigations, she joins forces with the cop and figures out that this has been going on for a very long time and in every case, the person who killed themselves had a smile on their face, and there was only one person ever to escape the curse.

And we'll get to that in a second. But the part that kind of let me down in this movie is that it was very reliant on jump scares, and I feel like jump scares are a little bit cheap, and that's why I kind of considered this movie to be a diet horror movie or a horror movie adjacent. That is, because a lot of the scary moments just come out of nowhere. They're very quick things, very quick jumps, screams, yells, and that's kind of what this movie based itself on

and relied on. And I just found the characters very one dimensional, which is usual for a horror movie. And really, Socie Bacon carry this entire movie by yourself, So I felt like you needed some support in this movie. The cop was okay, he was probably the second most likable character, but when it came to characters like her fiance, like

I like the actor who plays her fiance. He also plays a train on the boys, but I found it so unbelievable with their dynamic of knowing that her mom had killed herself and she was starting to experience these things and have you know, the weight of her career on her, and now is like trying to explained to him that she is not crazy and she's actually experiencing

these things. And he goes and seeks out the advice of her old therapist to come in and help and bombard her with that, like why would you do that? I just think if I was in that scenario, it would be more of a believable thing of like I would try to help my life with that, Like, no, I believe you, We're going to figure this thing out. So I found that part kind of annoying. And her going to the cop guy and confiding in him instead

to help her in the investigation. And the other thing about this story is It looks very good on paper, even going back through my notes of what happened in the movie. When you see it all written, it seems like a movie that I would really enjoy. But there was something that still just lacked in the execution of all these scenes and the execution of all this story that made it pretty boring. There was a solid forty minutes in this movie where I felt nothing really happened.

There weren't any scares. It was kind of just moving along at a snail's pace to eventually lead to what would be the ending. I did like the effect of her having to question whether or not things were actually

happening to her or not. I thought that was a pretty cool spin on this type of haunting story of something very creepy and kind of off the wall happens like whenever she's talking to her therapist and then suddenly realizes that that whole thing didn't happen, and then she snaps kind of back into reality that it's just a demon monster messing with her. So I thought that part was cool, but all those scenes were kind of few

and far between. Even going back to the birthday party where her cat had been missing from her house, for a while, I couldn't find it, and then she went to get her nephew a train set. She put that thing in a box and wrapped it up and then took it to the party. And then whenever the kid opens up the present, it's actually her cat that passed away. And you think in that moment that that is all going to be fictional and she was just dreaming it,

but that actually happens. That was probably my favorite scene out of the entire movie, just because of the shock factor. And I think that was at the moment where the movie started to kind of drag after that, and then it builds up to the ending, which I said in the spoiler free version, I already saw it coming. And I know this movie was based on a book, but I felt like they took a lot from The Ring, where in the Ring, you watched the tape and then

seven days later you die. In this case, whenever you witnessed this person killed themselves with a smile. Most people make it days. I think the most another person that made it was a couple of weeks. So she is racing against time before it finally gets hurt too, and she learned from the guy in prison that the only way he was able to beat it was to kill someone else, and that's what ended up landing him in prison.

But at the moment that he killed somebody else, this evil presence took it kind of a sacrifice and it was able to latch onto that energy and spare his life. So then she has the idea to go where there's nobody around her. She thinks if she can completely isolate herself, that this evil presence will have nothing to feed off of and she'll have no one to kill herself in

front of, therefore ending it. So she goes out to her childhood home, which the movie I felt was trying to make this connection with the way her mom killed. It opened with the first scene of her witnessing her mom dying, and you find out later that she killed herself from suicide. So I felt like it was trying to do this full circle moment and bring it back to her childhood home. I just felt that never really

connected there in the end, such an emotional thing. I thought was going to have a way to bring those two things together, Like you go all the way back through tracing this in history, that maybe the person that started with was her mom. It just felt like it was building back toward something like that and never really got there. Instead, she goes back to her childhood home, and this is where she confronts this demon. This is where we get our first good glimpse at it, and

it has some pretty good imagery. I thought the monster was not the most unique looking, but it was kind of jarring to see such a creature like this and then see us start to mess with her but not have that full capability to really take her over. And then you find out that it was able to trick her.

She thinks she is able to defeat the demon and burn it to the ground, drives back to the other guy's apartment, the cop who has been helping her the entire time, and you realize that was all a hallucination,

and she is back at her childhood home. The cop has arrived there and is knocking on the door and defeating the purpose of her being alone, he walks in he sees her standing there, and there it is the moment I was suspecting from the very start of it that she of course wouldn't be able to beat it. She's there with a smile and then lights herself on fire. Therefore, passing it along to this guy because the same thing happened she had to smile on she killed herself, and

now that curse is going to be passed on to him. Therefore, with the success that this movie has had now at the box office, costing only seventeen million dollars to make and making over a hundred million dollars across the globe, I think it's at a hundred and thirty seven as I'm recording. This now sets up that sequel, so they have an announced date yet, but of course there is going to be a smile too, and I think I'm okay with that. I think this franchise could get better.

It was a pretty minimal budget movie with seventeen million, and I have seen a lot of people since really enjoy this movie, and I think it just wasn't for me. And I'll stand by my two point five rating, and I give that a lot still to the marketing behind this movie. But I still think on paper it is a pretty good story. I just think again the execution

of it just didn't really hit. So if you have this good concept, if you have something that can be made into a sequel, I think all they need now is to take some more money into the production of this movie, add some more scares in there, build out a better story, maybe give a little bit more insight on what this curse actually is, some history behind it. They didn't really have time to get into that, even

though two hour movie. I feel like they should have gone to some of that and then just make a bit of a more hardcore sequel, just have some more action in it. That's really all this movie needs to be. I would say in the three point five range. They

could get there. And the only thing I hope they don't do a Smile, even though I want to know a little bit more in the background, is do a part two, then do a part three, and then kind of do what all the other horror franchises do and do a prequel to how it actually started, because I think that would be a very boring movie. I think they only need that to be maybe a five ten minute max sequence in a Smile too, but that does not need to be its own movie. I can only

imagine how much that movie would drag. So I think the best scene still out of the entire movie was her accidentally gifting the dead cat to her nephew and then at the very end when her mom morphed into that really giant sized version of her, that was creepy. For a little bit. It kind of felt like a Resident Evil video game style scenes, So I don't feel like it was anything I hadn't seen before, But that was the only moment that I felt like, all right,

we're finally getting going here. And then when she did defeat him in that scene, it would just kind of laugh. That was a little too easy, so bring us back to the real ending. I also think this is a pretty good kicking off point for Socie Bacon's career. Who is Kevin Bacon's daughter, And I wonder if they cast it her specifically, be because she looks so much like Hillary Swink, to the point that when I first saw this trailer, I was like, Wow, this is an unusual

role for Hillary Swank, not her at all. They just look very very similar. But she did carry this entire movie. I think obviously now that she's dead, we won't be able to see her kind of take that roll on again unless they bring her back from the dead or something. But I feel like with the success of this movie, maybe it would open up for another actor to want to take on her style role in the next one, even though it'll be the cop who is trying to

save his life. I think having another cool supporting role in that would make for a better sequel, especially now that it has some buzz around it. I think with the success of this and with the marketing behind it, this will be a movie we talked about for at least another four or five years, and I'm cool with that. I like any horror movie that gets some national attention that makes some money at the box office, especially with a low budget like this, and I am down to

give a smile to a shot. So that is the spoiler edition of my smiled review. Let me know if you had any other thoughts on the movie or if now you may go watch it for yourself. And until next time, go out and watch good movies and I will talk to you later.